I cannot express enough how elegant and beautiful blood over bright haven's story is, mechanically.
Sciona Freynan is not born, she is built. M.L. Wang builds her for this very situation to destroy her. Sciona builds herself to be completely infallible except for this one super-specific situation that she's spent her whole life assuring herself isn't the case. Every single decision she makes is the only choice you could ever imagine her making, largely bc she is a very extreme person and also every theme gets established and stated at the start. Sciona spends her her life fighting for a singular acceptable outcome and would rather die than accept anything less, which we are told since chapter 2 and shown since chapter 4. And yet you already see perfectly, even then, what she misses—how it will be undone. You can foresee how every element introduced to help her returns in double force to hurt her. I cannot write fanfiction because there is simply nothing to add (that doesn’t immediately kill her lol) . She is built, narratively, for exactly this break. Christ. Wow!! God!! There is nothing else that I could add without compromising her character. Sciona is EXTREME in her views and that makes her one of the clearest, most compelling, most solid protagonists in fantasy that I’ve ever read. God. I think about it constantly and desperately. It is a nearly a perfectly closed system of character and I am obsessed.
